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I recently ordained as a novice Zen priest in a ceremony officiated by Sensei Daiken Nelson at White Plains Zen. The traditional Soto shukke tokudo ceremony included some textual emendations courtesy of the Zen Peacemaker Order along with a priest’s pledge Daiken and I cowrote that was loosely based on an earlier pledge that originated with the High Mountain Crystal Lake Zen Community.Our version read:

“To be a priest is to serve sangha and world in accord with the Buddhadharma. I pledge to care for the Sangha, manifesting and maintaining practice and places for practice; transmitting and renewing its liturgy, rituals, and values; acting as a celebrant and mourner for rites of passage; and offering pastoral care in moments of need. I will study, embody, and share the Dharma. Taking the backward step, I will turn the light and shine it inward. As my robes signify the potential for awakening available to all, I will wear them with dignity. I will strive to actualize the fundamental point in each moment, practicing whole-heartedly, cultivating an intimate, careful attention to all things, bearing witness to the world’s cries of suffering, and fulfilling my vow to help all beings awaken. This is the way of the priest.”

The role of the American Zen priest is—like everything else—in flux. It’s clearly different from that of the traditional Japanese Zen priest who inherits a family-run temple and conducts funerary rituals. It’s also different from that of the Sensei who’s recognized for having achieved a certain level of spiritual attainment and is authorized to offer teisho and daisan. The novice lacks the full priest’s authority to teach, offer jukai, or preside over marriages and funerals. What the novice priest essentially has is the authority to chop wood and carry water—the exact same authority one had prior to ordination—that, and the right to wear the inner and outer robes of the priest and to learn how to conduct onself with menmitsu no kafu—the exquisite, careful, considerate, and intimate attention to detail that uniquely characterizes Soto Zen activity. In a culture addicted to fame, competition, consumption, and acquisition, the robes are reminders of the Enlightened Way to all who wear and witness them.

In American Zen, the path of the priest opens up opportunities to engage in pastoral counseling, chaplaincy, interfaith collaboration, presiding over rites of passage, and promoting social justice. It’s a means of both transmitting Japanese liturgy, ritual, protocol, and etiquette and also of thoughtfully adapting them to American needs. The priesthood embodies the Bodhisattva ideal of service to all beings. Since retiring from psychotherapy, I’ve sought to use the skills I acquired as a therapist—listening, presence, holding a space, using language to unlock potentiality—in some new role unconstrained by the dictates of professionalism, the medical model, the fifty-minute hour, and the insurance industry. It’s my greatest hope that the priesthood will prove to be a path that allows me to offer my skills in the service of wisdom, compassion, and awakening.

My Buddhist journey is a fifty-year arc: the adolescent student attending Alan Watts lectures in the 1960s; the psychologist on internship at the Center for Mindfulness in the 1990s; the yogi on retreat at the Insight Meditation Society and the Springwater Center; my jukai and shukke tokudo in the White Plum Asanga lineage and Zen Peacemaker Order. I went from being a Westerner interested in Buddhism, to a Buddhist sympathizer, to a lay Buddhist, to an ordained Buddhist—each of these stations on a journey towards greater commitment to a path that has continued to enrich my life beyond words, and for which I am profoundly grateful.

I have some concern as to how my fellow sangha members may react to my robes. Robes have the potential to signify something else for others than they do for me. It’s possible that the robes may be experienced—subtly or unsubtly—as somehow putting a separation between me and others. I hope that concern proves to be unfounded. While fully dedicated to zazen and awakening, many of my sangha members do not identify themselves as being “Buddhists,” and some are skeptical of and even averse to Japanese tradition and ritual. They lean towards a modern, American Zen—spiritual, but not necessarily religious—rather than towards preserving Zen’s Japanese heritage. I’m sympathetic to that—I’d have never found my own entry into Buddhist practice through more traditional Asian Buddhist forms. I’d probably have run the other way. My first teachers, like the late Toni Packer, stripped sitting and awareness down to its barest essentials, making it possible for a skeptical Westerner like myself to relate to them.

On the other hand, I’ve become more of a traditionalist over time, worrying about what may get lost in translation. I find traditional Japanese forms of practice beautiful and inspiring, and find great value in an etiquette based on infinite respect for all things, the spare Zen aesthetic, and a careful, intricate attention to detail. They remind me of my interdependence with and gratitude/respect for all-and-everything. They also serve as an antidote to the modern Western overemphases on individualism, the network of “me-ness,” and our focus on forever trying to arrange things closer to our preferences and desires. As the saying goes, “only don’t pick and choose.”

We’re all beneficiaries of an ancient flowing tradition. I’m grateful for that tradition and wish to continue to honor it as we step into the future. Not every aspect of it—not the authoritarianism and sexism, for example.But much of it. The dialectical tension between traditionalism and modernism affects every aspect of Buddhist metaphysics, ethics, and practice. It always has and always will as Buddhism has historically crossed and continues to cross cultural and temporal boundaries. I’m glad to be deeply rooted in and a part of an evolving tradition, and to be intimately engaged in the never-ending dialogue over how to shape its future.

At a dinner party the other night the perennial question — “is Buddhism a religion?” — arose once again. I’m not sure why this question keeps getting asked here in the West— it probably never gets asked in Asia. It’s only an interesting question if you have a dog in the fight — if you believe that religion’s either a good thing or a bad thing and need to decide which basket to toss Buddhism into so you can know whether you approve of it or not. Buddhist scholar Damien Keown devoted the entire first chapter of his Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction to the question, thereby making his very short introduction longer than it might otherwise have been. He enumerated various attributes of religions (ritual, myth, doctrine, ethics, clergy, temples, statues, pilgrimage sites, etc.) and explained why Buddhism ought to be considered one. In doing so, he compared Buddhism to the elephant in the hoary story of the blind men and the elephant — how it appears to be different things when seen from different vantage points. Gesshin Greenwood — a Californian-born Sotō Zen Buddhist nun residing in Japan — employed a different sort of animal metaphor when she addressed the question more succinctly:

I’m not an anthropologist and I don’t really know how to define religion, but you know how they say, “If it walks like a duck, and swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck?” ….For me, Zen Buddhism is definitely 100% a duck.

The question seems to comes up more often since I began preparing for novice clerical ordination (shukke tokudo) later this year.A religion without deity worship perplexes Westerners, so in the past I’ve sometimes resorted to categorizing Buddhism as “a way of life” or “a path” when trying to explain it to non-Buddhists.Once I decided to become a priest, however, that kind of evasion seemed less credible and illuminating.

So what does Buddhism-as-religion mean to me?Is it an elephant or a duck?To my mind,religions are — first and foremost — commitments to matters of ultimate concern. Being a Buddhist means making a deep and abiding commitment to wholehearted presence with things as they are; to summoning up all one’s wisdom and compassion —however meager they may be — and bringing them to bear on each and every moment, moment by moment.By wisdom, I mean a radical acceptance of the universe-as-it-is and non-clinging to all its manifestations; I also mean a deep and profound understanding of the radical interdependence of Being.By compassion, I mean an existential commitment to avoiding harm and reducing suffering, taking an active responsibility in the care of beings-and-things within our purview.

Many of the attributes Keown enumerates — ritual, myth, clergy, temples, statues, and pilgrimage sites — are nonessential attributes. I’m not dismissing them entirely, only assigning them their due place. They help enable the survival of the tradition over the course of centuries, much like the outer protein coat of a virus helps protect its inner DNA. They’re helpful to the extent that they facilitate awakening in moment-to-moment living. They’re unhelpful to the extent that they become objects of clinging and fixation, making us rigid and constraining our heartful, aware response to the exigencies of life. They’re tools that Buddhism-as-religion makes use of — upaya or skillful means — but not its core — its beating heart.

So what does it mean to be a Buddhist priest, especially for an existentially-oriented Buddhist who’s allergic to dogma and the supernatural?

The short answer — I don’t know.

The longer answer —I think it means being a handmaiden to awakening in whatever forms one’s own limited gifts allow.Finding out — exploring the possibilities that ripen as a consequence — is a path that’s been calling to me for a lifetime, from my preadolescent rabbinical fantasies, to my middle-aged fantasies of becoming a Theravada monk — never a possibility for married men and householders.Fortunately, history has been kind. The 1868 Meiji Restoration permitted the Japanese Buddhist clergy to marry, allowing me, one-and-a-halfcenturies later, to investigate that particular path.

I had a conversation a little over a year ago with Ted Meissner of the Secular Buddhist Association about why, although I’m sympathetic to their project, I don’t consider myself a secular Buddhist.I talked with him about the centrality of my experience of the sacred — of seeing all manifestations of the natural world as possessing a numinous quality of sacredness, and of the ultimate respect for beings and things that flows naturally from that experience. That particular variety of religious experience has been an integral part of my path. It’s what Buddhism means when it refers to the suchness of things — at least I think that term and my own inner experience share some congruence.The secular world has no reference point for this.Non-religious scientists talk about their experience of awe and wonder at the universe, but I’m not sure it’s the same thing.I think there are dimensions of human experience that science can’t — at least not yet, at least not as it’s currently constituted — include in its account of the way things are. The secular world can assign rights and ethical obligations to beings and things, but never holiness.

I suppose the other reason I’ve resisted being a secular Buddhist is that I’m an agnostic about many of the non-empirical questions Buddhist doctrine addresses.I’m skeptical of them, tending towards disbelief, but at the same time open to the possibility that I might be wrong. I see a commitment to secularism and naturalism as closing off possibilities I prefer remain open.So I leave the door ajar a little. You know the saying — keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.

I know that for many, Buddhism-as-religion means something else — something that gives clergy and temples and statues greater centrality — something that includes merit and prayer, rebirth and pure lands, hopes for protection and good fortune. But the key question isn’t whether Buddhism is a religion, but what sort of religion it is. And the answer is it means different things to different practitioners. I suspect that’s true for every religion — it can be fundamentalist, obscurantist, and dogma-ridden, or it can be an open invitation to explore the sacred, its outer trappings protecting, and at times hiding, a vital inner core.

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Random Quote

“Our practice and study are like trying to empty the ocean with a spoon, one spoonful at a time. It is certainly a stupid way of life, not a clever one. A clever person cannot be a bodhisattva.”-- Shohaku Okumura Living by Vow